Posts Tagged ‘time’
“In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous”*…
Your correspondent is headed off-line for a few days, so (R)D will be off until Monday, October 19, when (airline performance permitting) regular service should resume…
Billions of computers and phones run on code looked after by a handful of mostly-volunteer people. On his lovely site sheets.works, Akash Wadhwani introduces us to some of those generous souls…
People post [the comic above] whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled “all modern digital infrastructure” and it stands on one small block, “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003”.
We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC…
Wadhwani opens with the story of Paul Eggert…
Your alarm, a boarding pass, a meeting in another country, the day your salary lands: anything on your phone that shows a time has to know where you are. Underneath sit every Android phone, every iPhone and most of the servers on the internet.
They all get local time from one text file, the time zone database, which holds every clock rule a government has ever announced. Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA, keeps that file up to date in his spare time [and has since 2012].
4,000,000,000 Android phones and iPhones use his file. We didn’t count servers, Macs or laptops, which would push the number higher.
On 29 September Paul put out version 2026e of the file. The first line of its notes says that Manitoba moves to permanent -05 on 31 October, which tells phones in Winnipeg not to set their clocks back on 1 November, and it was typed in by two volunteers a month ahead…
Read on for 22 other tales of extraordinary generosity: “The people holding up the internet.”
* Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America
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As we give thanks, we might spare a thought for a man who, if not un-sung, has been at least under-sung: Walter M. Elsasser; he died on this date in 1991. A physicist, he contributed to science across several disciplines. In atomic physics, he interpreted electron scattering. In geophysics, during the 1940’s, he provided insight into radiative heat transfer in the Earth’s atmosphere, and developed the currently-accepted dynamo theory to explain the origin and properties of the Earth’s magnetic field. And he pioneered study of the magnetic orientation of minerals in rocks to reveal the Earth’s history of its magnetic field.
The last fifty years of his life were in large measure spent on biology, more particularly on Systems Biology: Elsasser worked toward a theory of organisms (an effort to establish the distinction between living and inanimate matter). His thinking is still at play in both Complex Systems Biology and Relational Biology.
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.”*…
Sumana Roy, with an arboreal meditation on time and rebellion against the straight line…
Have you seen the shape of a solitary tree on a mountaintop? There is no arrogance—it is not the monarch of all it surveys; its shape is that of survival, of fighting annihilation. If a morning hints at the DNA of the approaching day, might the shapes of young plants give us an intimation of what they will look like in advanced age? It must be this sense of amorphousness in the tree branches, going and growing, that makes me think of the shape of smoke, rising dark from the mouths of moving machines, marking the air as they travel, annotating their journey. . . . Are there knowledge systems in these shapes that might inform our understanding of art, creativity, knowledge systems, of time and history, of life and the living?
From the foothills I stare at the mountains and watch the evening grow; daylight suddenly ages, then dies. In the moment’s susurration, one could forget that the sun will return in the morning. Lights wink in the houses on the hills, spare sets of eyes for the dark—or like flowers budding, then blossoming. But that analogy doesn’t quite hold, because for those lights to be flowers, the houses need to be treelike. And our houses are not shaped like trees.
It is difficult to compare the shapes of trees with almost anything else. A flag flutters in the wind, and I can sense the longing of my mind to compare the character of that movement with those of leaves annotating the wind. But the flag mast is not a tree branch and no leaf moves like a flag, not even the banana leaf, whose behavior I’ve often mistaken for a Buddhist prayer flag. Sometimes when I watch leaves being tickled by the wind, I look at the tree nervously. It reminds me of a parent throwing their child up to the sky and catching her again, carrying her in so many ways, with risk as much as assurance. In this is a knowledge system of trust, how the branches hold the leaves and allow them to move without fear.
And what can a leaf’s shape tell us about its home? A palm’s leaf is like paper torn into strips that still manages to hold itself up. Where does such a shape come from? Does it offer protection from the wind, preempting what a strong sea breeze will eventually do? I have seen what such wind can do to billboards—puncturing them, tearing the faces of models and actors with unrelenting force, with a kind of strength that one can imagine only of bombs. There’s also the opposite: the shining solidity of a glossy jackfruit leaf confident even against the bullets of tropical rain. And their branches—hardy, patriarchal and solid, fortresslike, for they must hold the many fruits that cling like baby monkeys to their mothers. When I see the branches of different species, it is as if I can see their birth certificates. It is as if the shapes of the branches are a consequence of a negotiation, not only between the tree and the wind, but also between the tree second-guessing the behavior of the wind generally as well as the particularity of the wind in its home. What I see before me, then, is the shape of the creative process—the arrival of an idea in a leaf’s unfurling, followed by the acknowledgement of life’s exigencies and pauses in the influences of wind, water, and light. When it comes to branches, then, nothing beyond the search for sunlight is modular—everything is ad hoc, growth is provisional, spontaneity is not a choice but a compulsion. A tree’s diet is simple—water and light, but often inconsistent, and in its branches we see the shape of improvisation, of how artists and scientists adapt as circumstances change.
I am aware that I am seeking something beyond the botanical when I graze upon these branches. Is there a hidden history about form, about genre or about genealogy that I crave? In trees, I find a unit of time that is different from other kinds of living time—time is visible in the girth and growth of their branches, a history of ingestion manifest in the visual biography of its form. The difference in the ideas of time perhaps comes from our conditioning in stillness and mobility and, of course, from the directions of movement. Trees move, but usually—by which I mean visibly—northward; humans, mammals, and animals in our vicinity travel east or westward. In this, too, is the variety of our experiences of time.
I think of tree branches that, in search of light, have moved in the same direction. I will never know whether they wanted to meet—their crowns are, of course, shy, as the name of the phenomenon reminds us. The arrangement of branches might, for a moment, remind us of railway tracks, but there is no intimation in the latter of the death, the knowledge system we are all moving toward. Adulthood is the realization that time does not die with our death, and though one might be penniless and without possessions, one will always leave behind something: time, memories, an inheritance, for strangers to use. The absence of humans to the eye when looking out at the landscape from a train also does something—when humans do appear, they feel like numerals on a large clock, something upon which the eye may rest upon, but only for a moment, no longer. I don’t know of any tree whose branches are arranged around the trunk like the numbers on a dial. Sometimes I see a flight of stairs. They seem to disrupt the flow of time. I gradually begin to see that the uneven branches of trees, of varying lengths and thickness, do the same. Sometimes black smoke billows out of chimneys of brick kilns. In its sturdy curving, it has the arrogance of a statue—it stays in that position, as if it were holding its breath underwater, refusing to move. It looks ominous at first and comical in the end, like ambition does. How is its waywardness different from those of tree branches? Does it move like the branches of a tree, seeking something that it needs, or is it without hunger? The smoke will dissipate, of course, but the branches remain. But do they behave similarly in occupying the sky? The heads of the tea shrubs in the tea estates, growing beside the railway track—the youngest leaves picked by human hands keep the bushes flat as does the annual trimming in winter. In the difference of height and growth between the well-endowed shade trees and the tea plants is a quantifiable measure of a history of oppression.
Think of how branches get thinner as they move away from the earth. In this, they are not unlike air itself, in that the form of the trees becomes mirror images of roots. What does that do to our consciousness, for there is no resemblance between our feet and our head? Thin trees—young, planted recently—are straighter than older trees, in that they are like humans themselves, erect when younger, then slouching with age. Is Time erect like that? When does Time grow like grass? See how the branches touch the sky—poking, punctuating, even puncturing it. In these shapes also is some kind of constant self-revision, like a river that is constantly changing its course. Or at least that is what it seems like to an outsider species such as myself. In every knot, in every hole, in every bend, in every stop, in every pause, in every crest, in every depression, in every curl is a history of resistance offered by its surroundings. Form, then, is the result of a negotiation with the world, both of affiliation and disaffiliation, of support as much of antagonism. A history is revealed to us without any middleman or interpretation—a history that is so direct it surprises us, for we are not used to it. The shape of these branches—of history itself—is a rebellion against the straight line, against its autocracy. It reminds me that nothing can be reversed, that “undo” is a capitalist scam, that W. S. Merwin could not “unchop” a tree by assembling its branches together again…
“Ways of Treeing,” from @orionmagazine.bsky.social.
As Gary Snyder reminds us, “Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.”
* Herman Hesse
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As we learn from our elders, we might send fruitful birthday greetings to Nehemiah Grew; he was born on this date in 1641. A plant anatomist and physiologist, he is known as the “Father of Plant Anatomy.” Grew trained, then practiced, as a physician; but his passion was plants. In 1665, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on the strength of his paper The Anatomy of Vegetables begun. In 1682, he published what is considered his most important work, Anatomy of Plants…
It was divided into four books, Anatomy of Vegetables begun, Anatomy of Roots, Anatomy of Trunks, and Anatomy of Leaves, Flowers, Fruits and Seeds, and was illustrated with eighty-two plates, while appended to it were seven papers mostly of a chemical character.The Anatomy is especially notable for its descriptions of plant structure. He described nearly all the key differences of morphology of stem [or trunk] and root, showed that the flowers of the Asteraceae are built of multiple units, and correctly hypothesized that stamens are male organs. Anatomy of Plants also contains the first known microscopic description of pollen. – source
Linnaeus named a genus of trees (Grewia) in his honor.
“Time isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing.”*…
We keep marveling at how fast the years go by. The deeper problem, Mike Mariani argues, is that we’re forgetting them — and losing the quiet, boring moments where memory forms…
We’ve long been ensorcelled by the passage of time. Puckered leaves fluttering from the spidery arms of barren trees. Grains of sand tumbling through the delicate neck of an hourglass. A curved cornice perched over a snow-covered mountain, awaiting an avalanche to bring it down. These evocative emblems of seasons, hours, and the vicissitudes they leave in their wake speak to the bittersweet relationship we’ve cultivated with this unit of measurement.
Whether in Proustian reveries, digital photo libraries, or the watchful doppelgänger that gazes out at us each morning, ever-so-slightly altered, we’re inclined to a tender wistfulness toward time — the persistent awareness that, however fast or slow, it’s forever slipping through our fingers.
But lately, our relationship to the months, years and decades that landscape our lives has shifted in some unsettling ways. Instead of regarding the passage of time with introspection or melancholy, many of us now observe it with a mounting sense of alarm.
You don’t have to look very far to find ample evidence that we are experiencing a metaphysical crack-up around time. There’s a growing conviction among people from all walks of life that time is moving faster than it did several decades ago — or even prior to the Covid pandemic. While this belief crept into the zeitgeist like a sly, slinking fog, the refrains are now so pervasive that they’ve started to supplant idle chatter on the weather. Our focus has shifted from rejoicing in cloudless days or grousing over gloomy skies to fixating on the dizzying speed at which our lives are hurtling by.
This is particularly evident on sites like Reddit, where users now regularly commiserate over how rapidly the years are passing. A farmer whose work cycles alongside the seasons “can’t believe how fast this year has gone.” A middle school teacher recounts how she finds herself “having these conversations with students … who are perturbed by the speed of life.” Perhaps most tellingly, for a programmer, the “pandemic years blurred together, and everything after feels compressed, like one long season instead of separate years.” Civilizational events, including not only Covid but also climate change, large-scale armed conflict and the rise of AI “have piled up so quickly that it feels like we’re living through multiple decades at once.”
In recent years, these stray observations have coalesced into a chorus. Everyone from Boomers to Zoomers is mystified at how the passage of time has sped up, and feels disoriented by the strange velocity that’s colored how we’re living through the 2020s. But to hear these stifled laments is also to observe the absurdity of contemporary American life: While so many of us agree that our relationship to time has been warped, our collective response has been to shake it off and move on. It’s as though we all started losing our depth perception at the same time — crashing into road medians, pratfalling down staircases — and instead of resolving to rectify the predicament, we’ve simply resigned ourselves to daily collisions and collapses.
In some ways, the scale of this phenomenon resembles an episode of mass cognitive dissonance, or even a population-level folie à deux. It’s worth asking if something about our internal mechanisms for gauging the passage of time has changed — or been irrevocably thrown out of sync with human timekeeping and the atomic clocks we’ve structured civilization around for nearly a century. Or, alternatively, perhaps the pandemic spoiled our capacity to judge duration, expanding and contracting our sense of time over and over until the fabric grew loose and rippled, an undifferentiated mass of fibers stretched into a form we no longer recognize…
[Mariani considers the thinking of scientists and philosophers who’ve grappled with this issue since the 19th century, considers “the internal clock fallacy,” and explores the impact of modern technology (“Browsing, scrolling and swiping are more likely to quiet or even anesthetize our brains than activate them in the ways required to form memories…”). He concludes with a “defense” of boredom…]
The stakes of this phenomenon can sometimes seem low. Feeling like time is speeding up is not a “kitchen table issue”; it won’t raise your taxes or make you go hungry. But the TIMED project has demonstrated that people who feel like they’re losing time are genuinely unhappy and even distressed about it. Members of Gen Z, in particular, don’t talk about the quickening pace of their lives with disinterested curiosity or frivolous bemusement — they lament it. When we lose our grip on the passage of time, it can feel like we’re also losing grip on our own lives.
Western culture views time as a currency to be leveraged, channeled and optimized. The societal pressure to perform productivity at all times is so insistent and thrumming that many of us — myself included — have lost the ability to slow down and luxuriate in the inherent slowness of time, the way it oozes forward like honey slithering across a glass jar. When Aldous Huxley was asked about time by an interlocutor in “The Doors of Perception,” his reply was both simple and profound. “There seems to be plenty of it,” he said. Untethered from his ego and all the worldly attachments it clung to, Huxley was able to tap into the spaciousness of existence — an amplitude and abundance that’s permanent and inviolable, if only we still had the freedom to see it.
It’s true that technology has capitalized on this culture of synchronized compliance. The companies that manufacture our devices and make the programs that run on them have wedged themselves into this perverse relationship to productivity, offering the badges and motifs that signify a certain enterprising competence. As Jenny Odell points out in her book, “How to Do Nothing,” there’s a battle playing out “for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.” Through these products, we personify the ideals of practicality and industriousness.
The pandemic, too, eventually fed into the hungry zeitgeist of maximizing our output and sacrificing ourselves on the altar of “getting ahead.” The increased use of communications platforms like Slack, Teams and Zoom promoted a porousness between our work and home lives, allowing what Odell calls a “certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought” to infiltrate spaces long insulated from them.
This explains why many people feel that the way they experienced time during the pandemic never snapped back to how they processed it before Covid. In the aftermath, we became even more tethered to these platforms and other virtual spaces where productivity lingers at a low, insistent hum 24 hours a day. With our minds more anxious and overstimulated, our perception of time never had the chance to return to an earlier, more composed pace.
Further, trends that predated Covid resurfaced as though shot out of a cannon, and the ambient pressure to advance our lots at all costs imbued our culture with a mercenary quality. We were all racing to make more money, afford a home, secure a job, #YOLO at the live events we were unceremoniously robbed of. Amid this competitive turbulence — and the technologies that capitalized on our unease about it — everything started to move faster.
If we accept this premise, then maybe the crisis of time speeding up is not as hopelessly irreversible as it often seems. According to the latest time perception research, the amount of information our brains engage with shapes our subjective sense of how fast time is moving. If we intentionally reduce the stimuli we’re exposing ourselves to in a given day or week, then our brains will gradually slow down. And if our brains slow down, then our perception of time will taper off, too.
For their part, Ogden and other TIMED researchers feel that society has imposed too much responsibility on the individual to limit their use of technology. “Maybe it’s time that we shifted some of that onto the creators,” Ogden said. “The key metric for the success of digital technology is how long users are on it for, and how many people they can get on it for as long as possible. How do we flip that?” While we wait for those larger systemic changes, though, Ogden emphasized the importance of using our devices in a more intentional fashion. “What are you trying to get out of this digital technology use?” she asked. “You need to have an awareness of your own goals.”
In addition to modifying our own individual behavior, however, we also need to change the culture surrounding how we spend our time. That means coming to terms with the reality that boredom and “doing nothing” are neither shameful nor necessary evils. “There is huge value in doing nothing,” Ogden said. “We need to move away from thinking that it’s weird, lazy or slovenly.” Asked how she would spend a perfect holiday, Ogden described something very close to what people now labor so strenuously to avoid. “It would be to go and sit in a square in Italy with a nice glass of wine and watch the world go by.”
In his “Principles of Psychology,” William James invites us to participate in an experiment. “Close your eyes and simply wait to hear somebody tell you that a minute has elapsed,” he writes. The length of that single minute, he explains, will feel overwhelming. “You engulf yourself into its bowels as into those of that interminable first week of an ocean voyage, and find yourself wondering that history can have overcome many such periods in its course.” Those 60 seconds feel so full, James goes on, because “you attend so closely to the mere feeling of the time per se.” When our senses are engaged and stimulated, time is compressed, disguised, eclipsed. “The feeling of bare time,” however, “is the least stimulating experience we can have.”
We used to tolerate those interminable minutes standing in a crowded grocery line, gazing out the convex glass window of an airplane, waiting for the dull red digits on an oven timer to run down to zero. These are now the endangered species of our day-to-day lives. And they are far more valuable than we ever could have known…
“Your Perception Of Time Is, In Fact, Warped,” from @noemamag.com.
(Image above: source)
* Miles Davis
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As we think about time, we might spare a thought for Richard Trentlage; he died on this date in 2016. A jingle writer, he wrote jingles for dozens of clients, including McDonald’s, the National Safety Council, and V8. But he is surely best remembered for penning the Oscar Mayer jingle:
“Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener / That is what I’d truly like to be / ’Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener / Everyone would be in love with me”
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor”*…
We’ve become a nation of credit and debit card users. As of this year, Pew reports, 42% of Americans don’t use cash for purchases in a typical week (up from 24% in 2015); another 46% use a mix of cash and plastic; only 12% use mostly (or entirely) cash. The Federal Reserve reports, unsuprisingly, that cash remains the dominant mode for the elderly and the poor; debit cards, for lower-to-middle-income households.
NBER unpacks one little-understood consequence of this shift…
Every time a consumer swipes a credit card, the merchant pays an interchange fee—typically around 1.9 percent of the transaction value—most of which funds the rewards that cardholders receive. Because merchants generally charge the same prices regardless of how customers pay, consumers who use cash or debit cards effectively help finance the rewards enjoyed by credit card users. In Who Pays for Payments? (NBER Working Paper 35067), Mark L. Egan, Gregor Matvos, Amit Seru, Lulu Wang, and Vincent Yao use novel merchant-level data from Fiserv—one of the largest US merchant acquirers—to measure how the payment system redistributes resources.
The primary dataset contains establishment-level payment data from 2006 to 2022, including total payment values, transaction counts, and interchange fees paid for different card types…
… The researchers’ analysis using these datasets suggests that interchange fees transfer approximately $30 billion annually from cash and debit card users to credit card users. Cash users lose about 96 basis points of purchasing power, and regulated debit card users lose roughly 47 basis points, while basic and premium credit card users gain approximately 48 and 59 basis points, respectively. Because credit card use rises with income, the system generates an estimated $9.2 billion annual transfer from households earning less than $150,000 to those earning more.
Two forces moderate this redistribution. First, the tendency for cash, debit, and credit card users to shop at different merchants limits the overlap necessary for cross-subsidization. Second, where overlap does occur, such as at large grocery stores and gas stations, interchange fees tend to be lower due to sector discounts and negotiated rates. Together, these forces reduce the transfer by approximately 25 percent relative to the transfer that would occur with homogeneous consumers and merchants.
The researchers also examine the redistributive consequences of two specific developments in the payment system. The first is the Durbin Amendment, which capped interchange fees on debit cards issued by large banks. The authors show that one perhaps unintended consequence of the amendment was that it primarily benefited credit card users through lower retail prices at the expense of regulated debit card users, who lost approximately $9.6 billion in rewards and free checking benefits. This was a net transfer from middle-income to higher-income households. The second development is the rise of premium credit cards, which grew from 15 percent of credit card volume in 2006 to 60 percent by 2022. This has also been a regressive development. While premium cardholders gained about $7.9 billion, debit card users—not cash users—bore the largest dollar losses because they shop most frequently alongside premium card users…
The rich getting richer: “Who Ultimately Pays Credit Card Interchange Fees?” from @nber.org.
Pair with Annie Lowrey on another burden– a “time tax”– that falls disportionately on the neediest: “How American Bureaucracy (Literally) Steals Years From Your Life“:
Washington currently estimates that Americans spend 12 billion hours a year filling out government forms, meaning the average person spends six 8-hour workdays filing their taxes, signing up for Medicaid, renewing their driver’s licenses, and applying for government loans. At prevailing wages, this uncompensated labor is worth $430 billion a year. If Washington were to create a Department of Bureaucracy to take on the paperwork it shunts to citizens, the agency would require 5.9 million employees, making it four times the size of the active-duty military. The DOB’s payroll would be larger than that of every other federal department combined.
The nation’s paperwork regime frustrates every resident, and particularly lower-income residents who use more government programs and interact more frequently with public officials. The political scientist Elizabeth Cohen has done seminal work exploring time as a potent, if obscure, form of political currency. “The devaluation of a person or group’s political time is a structural obstacle to equality,” she writes. Yet we can’t measure time and effort as easily as we measure dollars, and we don’t even try. The 12-billion-hour estimate is an undercount, and an egregious one…
* James Baldwin (see also Terry Pratchett’s “Boots theory“)
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As we second-guess secreted subventions, we might spare a thought for Jean-Baptiste Colbert; he died on this date in 1683. A French statesman who served as First Minister of State under the rule of King Louis XIV from 1661 until his death. His lasting impact on the organization of the country’s politics and markets, known as Colbertism, a form of the mercantilism so popular in the Trump Administration today. Colbert also helped craft the Code Noir, a legal instrument that sanctioned an intentionally brutal system of torture and repression to enforce institutional slavery in the French colonial empire and restrict the enterprise of free Black people.
Though Colbert was more competent and less crony-ish than the crew at “work” in D.C. over the last couple of years, his goal of a healthy economy was frustrated by a King whose spending out-ran (and whose favoritism undermined) Colbert’s efforts. In the longer run, many economists suggest that “Colbertism” has contributed to contributed to a lack of adaptability in French industry and a hostility to technological innovation.
“I wisely started with a map”*…
From Daniel O’Donohue, 29 print-ready folding globe templates (the one above is “Earth Today”; there are also globes of the sun, the moon, the planets, and lots of different “views” of Earth) — every one free to download, print, and fold, and every one customizable into other shapes or create your own, with your own pinned places. via the custom globe builder…
… This project started with a simple observation: we look at maps on screens all day, but almost nobody gets to hold a planet. A paper globe is the cheapest possible spacecraft — print a sheet, cut along the lines, fold, glue, and you are turning the actual shape of the world over in your hands.
Nothing here is decoration. Every globe is built from openly licensed scientific data — NASA satellite imagery, USGS planetary mosaics, Natural Earth cartography, NOAA ocean data, the Smithsonian’s volcano inventory — rendered through real map projections into print-quality PDFs. Each globe credits its source, and the source is always one click away.
The fold shapes are the classics of mathematical cartography: icosahedra, dodecahedra, gores like a 17th-century globemaker would cut, even the Airocean projection that unfolds the world onto twenty triangles with barely any distortion.
The curated globes are free — print as many as you like. When you want a globe that is yours alone — your places pinned, your countries highlighted, your choice of shape — the builder is where it happens…
Getting our minds– and out hands– around the places we are: “Folding Globes.”
Harmonic: “24 Times,” from Gysin-Vanetti: “A collection of twentyfour variations on the theme “clock” created for HeK… Each of these clocks shows time in a distinct form. The result is a sequence of numbers, letters or punctuation marks animated in different ways….”
* J. R. R. Tolkien
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As we orient ourselves, we might spare a thought for William John McGee (or “WJ McGee, without the periods, as he referred to himself); he died on this date in 1912. An inventor, geologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist, he is remembered for his pioneering studies documenting the occurrence of waves of invasions and recessions of ice sheets in North America (thus establishing the complexity of the Great Ice Age). But he worked in a number of governmental and organizational capacities that contributed to teh development of geography as a discipline: e.g., as a director in the U.S. Geological Survey, and as a founder and president of the National Geographic Society. While on the staff of the Bureau of Soils, in 1918, he organized the landmark Conference of Governors on Conservation of Natural Resources, for whihc he has been called the “chief theorist of the conservation movement.”
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